iTunes Ping is drowning in spam

Apple may have entered the social network arena with 160 million potential users already on board, but the company’s lack of experience in this area is already showing. iTunes Ping is weighed down with spam just a couple of days after it launched.

Security company Sophos is recommending iTunes users upgrade to version 10, which introduces Ping, purely because it fixes a number of security vulnerabilities. But when it comes to spam they say, “Apple didn’t consider this when designing Ping.”

The result has been a flood of spam on to the new social network due to a complete lack of spam or URL filtering. If you want to see a free iPhone offer via a malicious URL, Ping is the place to go as there are thousands of them. Here’s an example:

Apple hasn’t helped matters by allowing Ping accounts to be created with very little in the way of secure information. The result is lots of accounts created just to allow for spam and scam distribution.

This means that Ping was either rushed out ahead of the event earlier this week, or Apple genuinely didn’t think about the potential for spam when creating the feature. I really hope it was a rush job and they are already working on better security.

To overlook the potential for spam when designing a new service is very surprising on Apple’s part. No one wants to be bombarded with spam messages, and to have a network flooded with them so early in its life will turn many users away. They may come back in the future when Apple has cleaned things up, but this damages Ping’s reputation and makes it harder to establish itself as a legitimate network.